Accepting Authoritarianism State-Society Relations in China's Reform Era [Hardcover]

Why hasn't the emergence of capitalism led China's citizenry to press for liberal democratic change? This book argues that China's combination of state-led development, late industrialization, and socialist legacies have affected popular perceptions of socioeconomic mobility, economic dependence on the state, and political options, giving citizens incentives to perpetuate the political status quo and disincentives to embrace liberal democratic change.Wright addresses the ways in which China's political and economic development shares broader features of state-led late industrialization and post-socialist transformation with countries as diverse as Mexico, India, Tunisia, Indonesia, South Korea, Brazil, Russia, and Vietnam.With its detailed analysis of China's major socioeconomic groups (private entrepreneurs, state sector workers, private sector workers, professionals and students, and farmers),Accepting Authoritarianismis an up-to-date, comprehensive, and coherent text on the evolution of state-society relations in reform-era China. The book is well paced, informative, and jargon-free, and for all these reasons it would be a good selection for university courses on contemporary China. Accepting Authoritarianismingeniously and exhaustively plumbs the literature on five key social groups in contemporary China to build a powerful and convincing case arguing that the incentive structure facing Chinese citizens encourages them to sustain the rule of the Communist Partyat least for awhile. Wright's book is an important contribution to the literature on post-Mao China. Its examination of the different attitudes of social groups toward the Communist Party's rule is based on extensive research. The analytical framework, which uses a political economy perspective, is straightforward and intuitively persuasive . . . Wright's clear and well-reasoned book is bound to elicit a spirited debate in the China field as to whether China's key social groups have indeedlÃ"